We need your help to determine where and how often this is happening. If you think your landlord is overcharging you, if you think your building should be rent-stabilized but it isn't, or if you're paying a "preferential" rent and seeing big rate increases, please take our confidential survey below.

We're also interested in hearing about any other strange things you may have in your lease — such as bogus confidentiality provisions, which we uncovered in one luxury apartment lease. This provision said that the tenant could not discuss the preferential rent with anyone without the landlord’s written consent. It's a scary-sounding provision, but likely unenforceable if a tenant brings a complaint against their landlord in court. "I want to make this illegal," New York City Council Member Ben Kallos said when ProPublica showed him a copy.

Close this overlay (subscribe to our email)

Close this overlay (search)

Close this overlay (Creative Commons)

Republish This Story for Free

Thank you for your interest in republishing this story. You are are free republish it so long as you do the following:

You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)

If you’re republishing online, you have to link to us and to include all of the links from our story, as well as our PixelPing tag.

You can’t sell our material separately.

It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.

You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.